James W. Menefield v. Robert G. Borg, Warden

How courts have described this case

Verbatim parenthetical descriptions written by other courts when citing this decision. Ranked by citation-network relevance.

• noting that a defendant’s decision to represent him- or herself is not “cast in stone”
• \We... hold that... an accused who requests an attorney at the time of a motion for a new trial is entitled to have one appointed\
• “[b]ecause of the centrality of the right to counsel, we will not deny a defendant that right during a critical stage of the prosecution unless compelling circumstances require us to .do so”
• citations to Mempa v. Rhay, 389 U.S. 128 (1967), and United States v. Ash, 413 U.S. 300 (1973), omitted
• “We are certainly unwilling to deny counsel because of some conception that the defendant’s initial decision to exercise his Faretta right and represent himself at trial is a choice cast in stone.”
• “A trial court cannot insist that a defendant continue representing himself out of some punitive notion that the defendant, having made his bed, should be compelled to lie in it.”

Source: CourtListener parenthetical corpus (CC0).